Who Are You Speaking To?

By Chris Butler, October 2009

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Who Are You Speaking To?

»	The Right Strategy
2.	Measuring the Data
3.	Creating Valuable Content

Most often when we fail to achieve the results we are after, it is due not to inadequate effort, but to doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We tend to set goals far more easily than we determine how to actually achieve them. And yet, when we don't reach our objectives, we are confounded as to why. This truth is at the core of why many companies (including Newfangled) struggle with maintaining a web content strategy: We know the results we're after, but we don't go about achieving them in the right way. We know that our goal is to build our businesses, so we must shift our focus to online engagement. But we are often reticent to let the chaos of constant and ubiquitous content remain the status quo and search engine optimization the only means to that goal. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So we do, creating plenty of meaningless content and burning out in the process.

This month, I want to share with you the conclusions we've come to about the right way to conceive and execute a web content strategy. Put simply, it comes down to the answer to one question: Who are you speaking to? Only by clearly identifying your prospects can you go about creating content that is truly valuable. Oh, and despite the obvious importance of search engine optimization, please don't misidentify search engines as your prospects. Robots don't read, people do.

What is valuable is entirely subjective, so for the purposes of this article, I'd like to define what I mean by valuable content in this way: Valuable content is material created for your prospects that engages their need and brings them into relationship with you. This definition may require you to completely rethink your content strategy. Or it may simply merit a subtle tweak in factors like the type of content you're creating, messaging, or frequency. Either way, if you do calibrate your strategy for value, your content will be more in tune with the needs of the people you are positioned to speak to by your expertise, and therefore much more likely to convert them from passive readers to real prospects. But before we get into our conclusions about how to create valuable content, I'd like to demonstrate how the evaluation of our own website data brought us to them.

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Comments

rob mariani	November 3, 2009 10:07 AM I think you mean "To whom are you speaking."
Chris Butler	November 3, 2009 10:13 AM @Rob Mariani, Yes, that would be the grammatically correct version of the title. Unfortunately, grammatically correct and easy to say are often mutually exclusive. I intentionally chose the simpler of the two. Thanks for the correction ;-)
Mark O\'Brien	November 3, 2009 10:39 AM Rob, I had the same thought when I first saw the proofed version of the article and then I remembered a great line from William Zinsser's "On Writing Well." Zinsser writes "'Who am I writing for?' The question that begins this chapter has irked some readers. They want me to say 'Whom am I writing for?' But I can't bring myself to say it. It's just not me." To me, this really sums up one of the book's main points--write as naturally as you speak: if you wouldn't say it, don't write it. I love this rule because of how personal it is. You very well may say "To whom are you speaking?", and therefore ought to write it as well.
Russ	November 3, 2009 10:51 AM That is very interesting stat about the miscellaneous referrals. The web is such a viral place where if you post good quality content, people will eventually find your site. And I consider that an added bonus... I believe knowing the customer and how they find your site is one of the most crucial pieces of info you can obtain...and probably the hardest to measure. Like me for instance... As a web designer, I just stumbled upon your site a few years back and enjoy reading your views and take on web design and the evolution of the internet. I was never looking for a company to help me develop a website... Great post as always.
Chris Butler	November 3, 2009 10:55 AM @Russ, You're right on about the difficulty of measuring how every visitor (or customer, for that matter) came to know about you. Amidst all the "direct" visits, there are probably a hundred different stories that involve word-of-mouth referrals and the like. I'm glad you stumbled upon us, however it happened, and have stuck around since then. Thanks for the compliment!
sarah dooley	November 3, 2009 11:27 AM "The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages." -William Safire "Whom" is often grammatically correct, but idiomatically optional.
Jeff Mason	November 3, 2009 11:54 AM Chris, how do you define "conversion"? Is it actual project starts, estimates, leads, click-throughs? And how do you track conversions that are outside of analytics?
Katie	November 3, 2009 12:04 PM While the message of this newsletter focuses a lot on the benefit of referral over organic traffic, I think there's a great SEO message here too. My clients are either are slaves to SEO (thinking of Google more than the actual humans visiting their site) or get completely SEO-phobic. The message of this article is of equal importance to both groups. If you really think about your audience as you write and publish helpful content, then the search engines will reward you. The details of meta titles, link names, meta data are important, but none of those things can work miracles on lifeless, phoned-in content. Great work again this month, Chris.
Chris Butler	November 3, 2009 4:16 PM @Jeff Mason, A conversion is the completion of any trackable goal you have set up as a call to action on your site (i.e. newsletter sign up form, quote request, meeting request, purchase, etc.). In general, it's a lead derived from web traffic. The chart I supplied was only including conversions that we track in analytics. However, we could fold in offline 'conversions' in terms of people that call us and let us know how they found out about us, but as I mentioned in the article, those are often pretty fuzzy. Thanks for your question! @Katie, Exactly! As I hinted in the introduction, I was speaking fairly directly to those whom you might consider 'slaves' to SEO. Those are the companies that write only to get indexable content on their sites. But, there are obviously many other good reasons to write for specific types of readers. On the other hand, those who are SEO-phobic, perhaps because they are still unclear about how it all works, might just need to get solid on the implementation details and marry that knowledge with an existing propensity and care for writing.
Alex	November 3, 2009 4:36 PM I'm surprised you don't get more conversions from links in your newsletter- don't you guys promote your webinars there?
MAggie B	November 3, 2009 7:58 PM So often sales divisions are seen as "them" by marketing and vice versa but what you're saying is a real insight into the fact that many companies are houses divided. And you know what they say about a house divided... One perspective could be that salespeople are the ones on the front lines, and as you say, gaining knowledge of what people need. So that should be valuable knowledge for marketing, and the "message" should start with them and be "cleaned up" for primetime by marketing. But on the flip side, marketing has to figure out what exactly is going to be sold before salespeople can go out with confidence making promises. The two sides need a single vision in order for the house to stand.
Chris Butler	November 4, 2009 9:24 AM @Alex, I was wondering if someone might ask that. You're right, the number is lower than it should be. This is because we switched from using our own newsletter application to using Campaign Monitor in August. In the chart I created, I only included data related to newsletters sent using our Campaign Monitor account, so that only reflects the last two months of activity. If that number is the average, though, it would still end up being less than our 'miscellaneous' referral traffic on the whole. This makes sense, though- people who receive the email have already converted by filling out our subscribe call to action, so the conversions we would get from the emails are either webinar registrations or new sign ups by people who had been forwarded the email by subscribers who had not yet been subscribers themselves. The latter does happen fairly frequently- we tend to get anywhere between 5-10 new subscribers on the day we send a new newsletter out. Good catch! @Maggie B, I think I get what you're saying, though I'd point out a couple of subtleties: That single vision you're describing would probably come top down in a company- solidified by the leadership and then handed over to marketing and sales. Particularly for a consumer product, there would have to be significant market research prior to any marketing or sales plan is solidified. On the other hand, with a service company (like ours), that process is very truncated and much more influenced by the feedback that the sales process gathers.
Rick	November 18, 2009 8:15 PM It seems to me that this highlights the beauty of successfully getting users to generate some of your content. When you can get people to contribute to your site, you should look good to both the robots and to the people they help draw in. The content should be relevant and presumably enhance whatever keywords you've chosen to focus on - after all, if they follow Google or Yahoo to the page and bother to comment, then what they leave behind should be at least somewhat pertinent (sans SEO spam of course).
Chris Butler	November 20, 2009 3:36 PM Rick, That could be true, provided that the users are properly in tune with what the content should be. But for a finely positioned consultancy, I don't think that would work. Chris